Free Notion Alternatives: Which Are Free Including Sync? (2026)

Joplin is the only genuinely free Notion alternative including sync, working across Dropbox, OneDrive, Nextcloud, WebDAV and S3 with end-to-end encryption. SiYuan is the counterintuitive one: fully open source under AGPL-3.0, yet it charges a one-time fee before you may sync to storage you already pay for.

Key takeaways

• Joplin (MIT) is free including sync across six backends with E2EE. No asterisk.
• SiYuan charges a one-time PRO fee to unlock S3 and WebDAV sync, despite being AGPL-3.0 open source.
• Obsidian is not open source. It is free for personal use, and Obsidian Sync costs $4/user/month annually.
• AppFlowy Local AI is free and unlimited through Ollama, which is the best free AI option in this category.
• Anytype is source-available, not open source, under the Any Source Available License.

The options

Two of the most-recommended options are not open source. Obsidian is proprietary but free for personal use. Anytype uses the Any Source Available License, which is not OSI-approved, the same pattern as n8n's fair-code model.

The sync cost table nobody publishes

The software being free tells you little. Sync is where the money hides, and it varies enormously.

SiYuan is the outlier and it deserves calling out. It is genuinely AGPL-3.0 open source, and it still paywalls the ability to sync to storage you already own and pay for. Not a hosted sync service, but your own S3 bucket or WebDAV server. That is an unusual choice and worth knowing before you commit a knowledge base to it.

Its pricing also needs care: a widely quoted figure is a limited-seat lifetime licence on promotional terms, not an annual subscription, and it reverts to a higher price once the promotional seats run out. Check the current terms directly.

Joplin is the honest answer to "which is actually free." Free software, free sync, six backend options, end-to-end encryption, Markdown files you own. Nothing else here matches that combination.

The AI question

If AI features matter, the landscape differs sharply from the marketing.

AppFlowy Local AI is the standout, and it is free. It runs models locally through Ollama (Llama, DeepSeek, Gemma and Phi) with no API key, no subscription and no usage cap. It works offline and your notes never leave your machine.

The caveat for a non-technical reader: you install Ollama separately and download a multi-GB model, and it requires Apple Silicon or a recent Windows or Linux machine. Our guide to running AI locally with Ollama covers that setup.

AppFlowy also sells cloud AI: Pro at $10/user/month annually ($12.50 monthly) for unlimited AI responses and 50 images, with an AI MAX add-on at $8/month adding frontier models. The free cloud tier gives 10 AI responses and 2 images monthly.

Notion AI is bundled into paid plans rather than sold separately, with the free tier offering only a limited trial. Fuller features like Notion Agent and AI Meeting Notes sit on Business and Enterprise.

Evernote's AI (AI Edit, Semantic Search, AI Transcribe) is Advanced tier only at $249.99 a year.

What Notion and Evernote actually cost

Notion: Free $0 · Plus $10/month monthly, $8 annually · Business $20/$16 · Enterprise custom.

One detail most articles get wrong: solo workspaces get unlimited blocks. The 1,000-block cap was removed in 2022 and only returns when a workspace has two or more members. At that point you can still read and edit existing content but cannot add new blocks.

Real free-tier limits worth knowing: 5MB per file upload, 10 guests, and 7-day version history.

Evernote: Free · Starter $99/year · Advanced $249.99/year · Enterprise custom. Its free tier is severe: 50 notes, 1 notebook, 1 device, 1GB, 200 attachments. The old Personal and Professional tiers are retired.

Coda no longer exists as an independent product. Grammarly acquired Coda in December 2024, then Superhuman Mail in June 2025, renamed itself Superhuman in October 2025, and Coda became Superhuman Docs. The new bundle is priced per seat rather than per Maker, which ends Coda's signature "editors are free" model. Any comparison still listing Coda's old pricing is describing a product that no longer exists.

Where paid genuinely wins

Being fair to Notion, several things are hard to replicate for free:

Real-time multiplayer collaboration. Notion's simultaneous editing is smooth in a way self-hosted alternatives generally are not.

Relational databases. Rollups, formulas, linked databases and views are Notion's genuine differentiator, and no open-source option matches the depth.

Mobile polish. Notion's apps are simply better built than most alternatives here.

Zero-setup sync and guest permissions. Sharing a page with a client who has no account is trivial in Notion and fiddly elsewhere.

One update worth noting: Obsidian's commercial licence is now optional and encouraged at $50/user/year, not mandatory. Older articles still describe it as required.

Which should you choose?

Choose Joplin if free including sync matters most. MIT licensed, Markdown files, six sync backends with E2EE, no paywall on anything essential.

Choose Obsidian if you want the best local Markdown editing experience and either pay $4/month for Sync or set up iCloud or Syncthing yourself.

Choose AppFlowy if you want the closest open-source feel to Notion plus genuinely free unlimited local AI.

Choose Logseq if you think in outlines and bullet hierarchies rather than pages.

Stay on Notion if you need relational databases or real-time collaboration. Nothing free replaces those properly.

Be cautious with SiYuan if sync matters, and check Anytype's licence before building a business workflow on it.

The verdict

The open-source note-taking field is genuinely strong, and for individual use you give up very little by leaving Notion.

Just look past "free and open source" to the sync question, because that is where the real cost sits. On that test Joplin is the clear winner, SiYuan is the surprising loser, and Obsidian sits honestly in the middle: proprietary, but transparent about charging for the one thing that costs money to run.

For a closer look at the three most popular options, see Obsidian versus Logseq versus AppFlowy.

Related reading: Notion AI versus ChatGPT and best AI productivity tools.

Pricing verified against each vendor's own pricing page in September 2026. Plans change often, so check the vendor's page before you buy.